Loudtalks

Group voice chats by pushing one button on your BlackBerry, Android and (coming in Q4) iPhone. Two million users sending 15 million push-to-chat voice messages per day (100 million per month) within one month of launch just on the BlackBerry platform. Expect to be serving 10 billion group chat messages per month by November 2011.

In 2007, before founding LoudTalks, our team worked together as offshore developers, creating applications that went on to serve tens of millions of users worldwide while developing our own applications.

One of the applications we built was a Push-To-Talk enterprise application that feaured efficient voice compressions (as low as 8 kbit/s speex voice codec) and dynamic adjustments that scale to achieve the best trade-off between latency and quality.

A fast, dead simple push to talk solution for business was attractive and although it generated great, happy customers, it never really challenged our technology.

A few months ago, we developed a BlackBerry version of the technology as a new venture focussed on consumers. We expected to learn from the BlackBerry application and ultimately apply that to our iPhone application. Instead, we actually found virality we didn't anticipate, with 100 users per minute not only downloading, but using LoudTalks Lite and loving it.

Naturally this caused demand on our registration servers that required more capacity (through hardware and software improvements). We started with software and came up with a solution that doubled server capacity in three days, allowing us to satisfy the feaverish demand for the application.

Today we are launching the Android version on our way to serving 10 billion group chat messages per month.